There are several reasons that I wrote How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values but one of them was to combat the kind of stinking thinking that is reflected in this Johnathan Capehart piece. Capehart is promoting a podcast he did with George Mason University professor Justin Gest who has a new book he’s promoting: The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality.
Now, on the one hand, Prof. Gest has some worthwhile observations that echo much of what I’ve been saying of late. For example, the following is accurate and sounds a lot like what I wrote in my recent piece: Democrats Lost the ‘Poorly Educated’ and They Need Them Back.
“So much of Donald Trump’s politics is symbolic,” Gest explained. “They’re symbolic in the sense that this is what people want to hear and if it doesn’t get done, it’s almost beside the point because he’s elevating the prerogatives of his constituents to the national stage after having been relegated to the fringes of American politics for decades.”
But I really object to this next part:
Listen to the podcast to hear this important and provocative conversation about how economic dislocation and demographic changes are fueling discomfort and desperation among white working-class voters. While Gest says that both Republicans and Democrats have exploited these voters, he sees a way forward.
“The only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care,” he said. “These are communities that are on the paths to death. And the question is: How can we make that as comfortable as possible?”
Giving these communities hospice care to make their coming deaths as comfortable as possible is precisely what I was referring to when I wrote about why working class cultures didn’t warm to the idea of free college education:
That the Democrats walked into this milieu with a message about the importance of education was ill-fated even if well-intentioned. What people really wanted was an economy where a higher education wasn’t necessary. The Democrats quite reasonably thought they should offer something based in reality with a real chance of enactment and good prospects for improving people’s lot. What they missed was that the battle was being fought on different turf. People were sick of losing in the modern economy. They were sick of seeing their traditional way of life slip away. They were tired of being condescended to and told that they weren’t smart or educated enough to compete. What the Democrats were offering was in some ways just further confirmation that they were losers who were going to continue to lose. Trump might not have been able to explain how he’d fix things, but he met them at the level of their desire.
My description of the situation was very similar to the description provided by Prof. Gest, but our solutions couldn’t be more opposed to each other. He thinks they’re going to die as a culture in both a figurative and a literal sense, and that we ought to focus on making this a kind of peaceful morphine-infused experience. If that’s the best we can do, then a simple instinct for self-preservation ought to lead them as far away from the Democrats as they can get.
What I tried to do is introduce actual policies that can appeal to these voters and genuinely save them, their communities and their culture. We saw what happened when we offered palliative care by the way Kentuckians resented Obamacare even as it did more for them than any federal program since Lyndon Johnson was in office. They slapped away the hand that sought merely to mitigate their condition rather than improve it on the level of dignity and opportunity. They’d react similarly to free college or more generous programs for the poor and unemployed. If we offer them a more comfortable cultural death, we should expect to remain as popular as a smiling Grim Reaper.
To even frame things this way is a kind of political suicide for the left that will assure that when 2020 arrives the Democrats will do even worse in these communities than they did in 2016. If you still don’t understand just how badly the Democrats did with these folks (from the richest to the poorest) then you should sit down and read How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values. If the left doesn’t fix this, the Democrats will be in the wilderness for a long time.
But it’s not actually a misinterpretation of political self-interest that appalls me in this case. It’s the idea that the modern left can self-define itself in a way that leaves out any hard-pressed community. I believe Anti-Monopoly policy can bring economic vitality back to these communities and that it is simply irresponsible to tell them that their communities are doomed without having made a real effort to save them. If I lived in a culturally working class county, it would be as clear as day to me that the left, as currently comprised, has no plan for me. I completely understand why the Democrats have cratered in county after county after county in this country. We like to tell them that they’re voting against their self-interest, but how is it in their self-interest to latch onto a party that thinks they’re beyond help?
I’m not saying the whole Democratic Party feels this way, but the default position among a lot of progressives since the election has been that to even talk about these folks is to pander to their racism and dilute the party’s commitment to civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the environment. If we want to draw up our battle lines like that, then they sure as shit are going to take the hint.
Sure, part of my argument is based on naked self-interest. The Democrats will continue to be a minority party in most of the country and in most legislatures unless they can compete in these areas and at least win a respectable level of support. But it’s also a moral argument. I don’t recognize a left that has no better solution for struggling people than to make their inevitable deaths more comfortable. That’s not just a political loser. It’s an indefensible position to take as human beings. Every single community needs a left that will represent them and that doesn’t mean it will tolerate them or give them just enough to ease the worst of their pain.
Anti-Monopoly policy is where I start. If you’ve got something better, offer it, but don’t act like Kevin Williamson of the National Review:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. . . . The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
That’s what conservatives say about these folks when they think they’re not watching. I hear progressives say effectively the same thing all the time. Maybe some progressives don’t want to look for solutions here, but there are Democrats who are going to work for these people regardless. Join us or don’t, but it’s past time for licking wounds. It’s roll-up-your-sleeves time, because things aren’t going to get better by doubling down on what just failed.
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There are very powerful global forces reducing the number of high-paying working class jobs. Automation is one example. Free trade is another. Attacking market concentration, which I believe is your central idea, isn’t going to change that. In addition, we are in the middle of the unwinding of the grand racial bargain forged a few centuries ago between the landowners and the slaves and indentured servants of European origin whereby our modern notion of race was invented to divide “white working class people” from blacks/slaves and set the former above the latter. This higher status, which is weakening by the… Read more »
No. Automation causes a lot of manufacturing jobs. So does globalization. But these things have nothing to do the decimation of main street America. What’s killing these communities isn’t the loss of assembly line jobs. It’s the loss of an entrepreneurial class and the money, skills, opportunity and leadership that class used to provide. It not the steel plant that needs to come back. It’s the realty business, the book stores, the pharmacies, the hardwares shops, and countless other businesses that have succumbed to a simple refusal to enforce antitrust and anti-monopoly rules. Your options are now down… Read more »
I couldn’t agree more. My eyes were opened to this when I read “When Corporations Rule the World” by David Korten.
I’ve also seen the decline with my own eyes in the small town that houses my race shop…
But these things have nothing to do the decimation of main street America. What’s killing these communities isn’t the loss of assembly line jobs. It’s the loss of an entrepreneurial class and the money, skills, opportunity and leadership that class used to provide. Are you channeling Thomas Friedman? You sound just like him when you write that. The communities that are making it share a key attribute: They’ve created diverse adaptive coalitions, where local businesses get deeply involved in the school system, translating in real time the skills being demanded by the global economy. They also tap local colleges… Read more »
I honestly don’t what you mean because you seem to be refuting the same point I was attempting to refute.
Regardless of whether the local retailer sector is dominated by Wal Mart and Target or a bunch of mom & pop stores, the money to buy at those places comes from wages paid to people in the local community. Who pays those wages? It is either a factory or a farm. As those entities disappear or automate, the local community shrinks and many are impoverished. I see no obvious way to reverse these trends and your policies don’t address them. Also, Trump voters are in general well off. They are far more motivated by cultural issues, mainly race. Sorry, BooMan.… Read more »
This idea that Trump voters are well off needs to die for 3 reasons: it’s actually Republican voters who are well off. this is a cultural problem not a strictly economic one, which is why I always focus on county-level data, not income. where it matters is what matters. Trump loses the popular vote and wins. The Dems get more votes in the midterms and get shellacked. More people vote for Dem senators and we don’t control the Senate. This is about geography, power sharing, realignment, and culture. It’s not about who makes the most money, but it is about… Read more »
You’re attacking a side reference and ducking the main issue. Hypothetically we could bust Wal-Mart & etc. and restore the rural commercial sectors. But that won’t restore a financial base to pay for those commercial activities. Farming is heavily mechanized and wages for farm workers will stay low. The owners can and do live elsewhere. Rural factories don’t compete with urban factories well anymore. There’s opportunities for tourism in some places, but not all, and that doesn’t seem to be appealing to this culture anyway based on places like West Virginia. There’s clean energy in some places, and that isn’t… Read more »
Farmers are not paid wages, they work their own land. what is all the anti- rural sentiment, much of it based on ignorance? i wonder if it isn’t something about getting control of rural ppl’s land. There’s a lot of media ridiculing rural and small town ppl, – I’d call it generations long propaganda, making it easier for some to write off an entire segment of our citizens. Garrison Keillor is a major offender.
Those book stores, hardware stores and such went out of business to Walmart and similar large merchandise chains. Walgreens and CVS now run the pharmacy business. I doubt you can break them up. That horse is out of the barn.
There are still small factories making parts for larger businesses. And if they are to be believed they often do not have enough qualified people to expand. I have a few friends who owned small businesses – small factories actually. They both say they could not hire people.
Do you understand how these corporations ate up everything? Do you understand what kind of political coalition prevented that from happening for a 100 years?
There were huge monopolies during the industrial revolution run by Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan and others. It was no fun working for them and when the first unions came around you had to face the hoodlums sent in to break you up. Teddy Roosevelt took on Standard Oil and broke it up, but the gilded age survived until the Great Depression. Things were good until the seventies or maybe a little before then until Vietnam and the oil crisis. It’s been downhill ever since, at least after the Powell memo encouraging the corps to fight back. Now about those good times….
Since you won’t read it, I’ll excerpt it. In many ways, we’ve been here before. At the turn of the last century, heartland America was deeply troubled and full of grievances against elites. Millions of American farmers saw their way of life threatened by falling commodity prices, predatory lenders, and monopolistic railroads and grain dealers. Small-town merchants faced extinction at the hands of giant chain stores and mail order catalogs. Christian fundamentalism would for the first time become a powerful self-conscious force in American society, along with a revitalized Ku Klux Klan expanding out of the South to places like… Read more »
You’re right I did not read it. But you posted it once before and I did browse it. Nonetheless… I hope the message is right. You can almost hear it now. You mean you want to break up Walmart, and etc. … And you want to make American business less competitive in the world? Will everyone be happy when prices all go up? As a proforma message it works well. OTOH I could easily say shit yeah. There is certainly truth to the idea that monopolies have taken over a lot and are driving the bus. – One question do… Read more »
In case you haven’t noticed, American business is less competitive in the world. Outside of the corporate headquarters, that is. And mostly even there.
Sherman Act is relevant if it is enforced and has the court precedents that allow enforcement to change behavior. Neither of those have consistently happened in the past 37 years.
I have lived on and off in small owns and watched the destruction of Main Streets by WalMart and local manufacturing due to NAFTA/ free trade deals. Those actions have done more to rip the guts out of those communities than any move to automation. Its not just wages lost, the local civic culture leadership that went as well. Little League sponsorship, charity drives, town beautification, local hospitals, etc… All the extra elements that contribute to the quality of life in a town and fosters a sense of community. Booman is right in that jobs promote dignity. Local… Read more »
It’s essentially what white flight did to our cities for a long time, but with a variety of different ingredients as the cause. Concentration of markets can happen because of concentration of economic and cultural life in more central places. The economy of scale, and the ability to exploit government policies advantaging scale, operates by creating goods and service deserts in formerly vibrant communities. It is exactly what has stripped urban areas (until gentrification brings them back) as a result of white-flight suburbanization in expanding ring suburbs. When the rural gets gentrified, those goods and services return but the locals… Read more »
You’ve hit on another problem with prioritizing a GA-06 over a MT-AL. The Democrats become the white professional party, not as some kind of cultural adjunct but as a core constituency. And then they’re tax averse, protective of the educational status quo, supportive of NIMBY rules and essentially a gentrifying army. The underclass is as shut out in this power dynamic whether they’re urban or rural. The only real populism becomes either rightwing nativist or filled with important urban rage. The Dems become a left-wing party only as pertains to inclusiveness, and then often more the surface than in the… Read more »
Exactly. But the professional class that often gets represented at the local and state level are the homebuilders, developers, lawyers, professional (civil) engineers, and construction company guys, a certain class of physicians, and school teachers. Notice in this list which gets the short end of the stick.
At the national level, the professional class that gets the highest priority are the lobbyists and campaign consultants and the clients they represent.
Yes, surface more than substance on inclusiveness — and there you have the tragedy of the Obama Presidency. And the internal fear among those in the party today.
Interesting item on NPR this morning about upper middle class being un-self-aware that it is the beneficiary of so much in the way of government preferences.
Automation causes a lot of manufacturing jobs. So does globalization. But these things have nothing to do the decimation of main street America. What’s killing these communities isn’t the loss of assembly line jobs. It’s the loss of an entrepreneurial class and the money, skills, opportunity and leadership that class used to provide. It not the steel plant that needs to come back. It’s the realty business, the book stores, the pharmacies, the hardwares shops, and countless other businesses that have succumbed to a simple refusal to enforce antitrust and anti-monopoly rules. First and foremost, a bunch of… Read more »
We’ll keep trying and take our converts as they come.
you ignore agriculture
How many actual bodies are needed to work a 6000-acre soybean farm?
fewer nowadays, though monoculture not-a-good-thing. but there’s the support businesses as well
also – low density population, with viable network of small businesses and ag endeavors with supporting institutions [schools, hospitals, banks etc]
family farm, organic farms, it’s a quality of life model not extractive model and I’d be surprised if you don’t have plenty of viable such near you – add the tourist industry as well for your area
Hasn’t kept down East from shedding population like mad.
Washington, Aroostook in particular.
All the growth is in what is essentially the northernmost North Shore of Boston.
productivity doesn’t require the numbers required in previous centuries. need to adjust the thinking – on this point. I attended a meeting on economic growth in N NH a couple years back. an underlying assumption that “growth” (including population growth) was required for a productive economy meant from the outset the discussion went nowhere.
yes but isn’t agriculture facing similar situations?
automated, fewer workers, less capital in the area?
I think it still applies
The loss of jobs and decline of communities is not only in manufacturing towns. Many Main Street communities have been lost to agribusiness, which has destroyed family farms, ranches and orchards. The capital needed today to farm is beyond individual families. Beyond entire communities, for that matter. And the return can be very low. And extremely unpredictable due to weather. For decades now we have been reading about small towns in rural area that have died or are on hospice care, to use the metaphor of this discussion. My community has gone form ranching, mining and rail road maintenance as… Read more »
And “Break up the monopolies! Break up the big banks!” will do what, exactly, for your area? See, despite all the good reasons for going the antitrust route, and there are plenty, it’s far from a magic bullet.
There’s also the pesky little problem of getting any such legislation past the GOP-controlled Congress and, if it did pass, by the Gorsuched Supreme Court.
Hmmm. I haven’t said a word about monopolies or big banks, so not certain why you responded as you did.
Because that’s what the overwhelming majority of comments by others here seem to be advocating. I’m pointing out that the very real problems you describe would get little if any relief from those policy prescriptions. What would help? Damned if I know; but busting up Walmart or Bank of America doesn’t appear to offer any solutions in your neck of the logged-over woods.
it would break big agribusinesses too and allow more family farms, the problem is I don’t know if that’s enough to save all or even some of these communities
I agree very much with your take. Let’s start by defining what voters want: I believe they want relatively stable jobs that pay enough to raise a family on. Further, they want jobs to be plentiful enough so that their children will not have to relocate to find work. The only way to generate rising incomes in a capitalist economy is to create labor scarcity. Period. So either you create policies to do that, or you start to move to some sort of Democratic Socialism where you tax the rich and redistribute the funds directly through some sort of UBI.… Read more »
The most effective way to subsidize employment is to create public jobs that are adequately organized, adequately paid, and do real and necessary work. The New Deal knew how to do that. Nixon’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program did not; it was grift for private contractors.
Infrastructure (the services that you want to be universal) is the best arena of real jobs at the moment. And it is needed everywhere people are.
Trump keeps promising that.
The WPA and CCC should have been continued. They would have ensured full employment if run to complement other employment.
You seem to be talking about inequality. Sanders made a big deal of that. Solve that problem and much of the rest falls into place. Since the seventies most of the productivity gains have gone to corporations and then the top ten percent. We can’t even increase the minimum wage for shits sake. After nearly fifty years we done got us a big problem, and we all have a piece of the elephant. So everyone has a solution. Now Trump and friends got us by the balls and are fixin to lower taxes for the assholes and gut the safety… Read more »
One key here is to understand that the Obama voters that Clinton lost do not give a shit about inequality. They don’t want to soak the rich to pay for other people to be idle. They don’t want food stamps, health care, free college, etc. What they want is for a semblance of what they once had, which seems idyllic compared to the present. We can’t get them that world back entirely. We can’t reverse automation or the forces of globalization. We can only make it possible for them to compete again in the local economy, and not primarily… Read more »
i still don’t see how the monopoly message gets them to compete again. But, as I’ve said it can be part of the policy. But I still believe there are those who care about their economic well being like health care and improved income, They likely don’t care about the money the Kochs have. But in the end if we are to reverse the last fifty years of stagnant wage growth the share of productivity going to the top needs to be reversed. That will tend to reverse inequality. And I am not firmly opposed to soaking the rich. Those… Read more »
Can you be more specific about what Obama offered that you believe neither Sanders nor Clinton did?
he actually left the cities and went to talk to them, that’s big just to be heard
One of your colleagues at the Washington Monthly should read your columns. She is still fixated on beating up on progressives for wanting to do something different. She also doesn’t seem to interested in trying to address the concerns of rural people who voted for Trump. Like a lot of other Democrats out there, she still has hurt feelings about the election.
I’m with you. I just want to win power back and do it in a way that is morally good.
Going to a Democratic Political Event these days is like going to the house of a couple where one of them had a torrid affair. Ever been to a party like that? Everyone smiles and makes sure that no one mentions what everyone knows happened. And then a year later you go the couple’s house again, and the strangeness has worn off and people actually forget about it. If someone says the word Clinton at a Democratic function all the Sanders people nod, and the Clinton people do the same when Sanders is mentioned. And everyone hopes to god that… Read more »
While I can support an anti monopoly policy I keep wondering how that helps and how long it takes to work? Are we talking about breaking up monopolies like Verizon or Comcast or perhaps companies that control markets like Sam’s Club? I agree education is a two edged sword since so many have passed those years or have little or no interest. But perhaps trade schools will work. Could we sponsor a small business effort in some communities. I do believe health care,increased pay and child care services will work. My grandson who lives in rural Ohio just got… Read more »
Breaking up media and banking would be brilliant ideas.
I could get behind that. Make up the placards. Make the top four banks sixteen banks is a beginning. There are other industries and companies too. Can we campaign on it though or will we be open to some serious blowback.
Breaking up companies means more jobs as corporate-level jobs get duplicated. The counterargument is based on the supposed “efficiency” of concentration. To which the question is “efficiency at doing what?” Suppressing wages and salaries, fleecing customers, evading responsibilities to governments, hiring lawyers, and dodging responsibility seem to be the major efficiencies — akin to strip-mining. Banks should devolve to the state level. Even regional banks turned out to be a bad idea. So break them up into 50 commercial banks. Separate the commercial banks from the investment banking and non-bank businesses. Media should be broken up by medium. Journalistic functions… Read more »
I pretty much agree with those ideas with an important caveat. We need to be cognizant of the global economy where many of these businesses operate lest we make them non competitive. That could even apply to,banks who need to be large enough to handle large trades and many of them. There was a time when the global economy was not too important. But the world has changed. I would not like us to give up our advantages.
Actually if we care about climate change we need to be less cognizant of the global economy. Or even the national economy. Global supply chains waste enormous amounts of fossil fuels to keep them going. It goes beyond the vegetables transported 2000 miles to grocery stores waste of fuel.
It is variety not competitiveness that the global economy brings. Just ask the folks who used to work in textile mills, clothing plants, furniture factories, and other manufacturing in the US.
I don’t understand what advantages other than cheap and crapified goods that you think we have from the global economy.
And there it is. Cheap. It’s cheap goods being held on a string that allows the US worker/consumer to eat and feel/pretend to be middle class. After stagnating income and decreasing/removing benefits so that the owner and operators earn all of the productivity gains, the cheap goods are the only way the US worker/consumer is able to survive. So, chicken and egg time, how do we make goods more expensive after increasing worker income? Because if we get the order wrong, all hell breaks loose. We have to increase worker income/benefits before making goods more expensive. The order in which… Read more »
Responding to climate change is the disruptive factor that we have been avoiding since the oil crisis of the 1970s.
And natural resource limits mean that goods will not continue to be cheap unless a lot of the transportation costs are wrung out of them; that leads to smaller scale and more local operations.
You either do it voluntarily or an economic crisis forces you into it. Business as usual will not continue to cut it.
we just need to invent food replicators – problem solved
Sounds good. How do we translate an anti-monolopy policy into electoral victories?
What’s the story that motivates people to vote Democratic? Who are the villains? In what language do we attack them? What’s the slogan? Who do we hate?
please try to grow up.
That’s a pretty weird reply.
Think on it.
You: We should run on anti-monopoly platform.
Me: How do we convert this wise policy into actual votes?
You: Grow up.
Because the last election was decided by rational-choice actors picking among the policy prescriptions on offer.
BooMan, you once said that you had found an ally in the fight. It was a link to an NYT article I think. At the time I could not read it, and now I can’t find your link. Do you remember?
Joan Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and author of “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.”
Many thanks. I will read the book.
The problem is unaccountability. The Republican Party is the party of unaccountability. The Republican Party wants business and police to be above the law. That is bad magic. — There’s your message: necessary, sufficient, and the only possible one, either morally or practically. Do not “start” with “anti-monopoly policy”. That is only a corner of the real problem, which is that business has been placed above the law — ALL laws, not just the Sherman Act. You can’t stop a bully by protecting one victim at a time. You may, indeed, be able to protect a victim here and there… Read more »
If only helping these people and getting their votes weren’t such contrasting, separate goals. That should be a simple, democratic cause-and-effect/stimulus-and-response equasion…but it’s turned into a kind of kabuki-theater magic trick where you’re compelled to wave one hand while the other acts. It shouldn’t be like this, and the only reason it is has to do with decades-long disinformation and propaganda campaigns (as has been discussed here and elsewhere in great detail). Getting the fucking story straight in voters’ minds about who’s responsible for what, who can be blamed, and which policies will help or hurt, is the jungle every… Read more »
America’s Monopolies Are Holding Back the Economy I suspect Martin contracted this one out. It gives some pretty compelling reasons to get behind anti monopoly. As it happens, Clinton did have the germ of exactly such an idea–if one knew where to look. In an October 2015 op-ed, she wrote that “large corporations are concentrating control over markets” and “using their power to raise prices, limit choices for consumers, lower wages for workers, and hold back competition from startups and small businesses. It’s no wonder Americans feel the deck is stacked for those at the top.” In a speech in… Read more »
One more and I promise to go away.
link
Apple and Google are the phone market; they wrote the software. The connection market has a few more players, an oligopoly. The competition is limited. The disruption actually resulted in more functionality but higher prices; telephone communication is becoming less and less universal as it takes a larger share of declining wages and salaries. That happened in the software industry the moment that licenses and copyright extended permanently to software, look-and-feel was copyrightable, and chips and context became essentially permanent intellectual property, not a temporary privilege of 7 or 35 years, or the lifetime of the human creator. Digital rights… Read more »
I don’t know what to make of that. The sw that was developed by Google and Apple helped make them leaders in the smart phone market. But I don’t see how or why you break them up.
The article in Atlantic I posted above includes the memes presumable someone would use to reach the people, including the promise to appoint a special investigator to go after the bastards. It is populist like Trump. I am still not convinced. but I would try anything.
How is easy. You break them up either functionally or geographically, or both. Functionally separate search from search engine optimization issues from phones from broadband from (what else is Google involved in?). For Apple, it’s hardware, software, services. Geographically, you force a continental split or a national region split. More important is the finance, insurance, and real estate industries. Failure to break up concentration there could result in insured commercial banks informally underwriting risky investment bank loans for the same institution. That is one of the dynamics in the too-big-to-fail pattern. The past fraud in the mortgage derivatives business is… Read more »
On banks, they had the chance to break up the four or five big banks and passed due to the supposed new regulations. But I agree it would be good to bust them up, if they can.
The problem with much of this is how are you going to do it. As noted there is nothing illegal about being a big corporation or even a monopoly. And some of those big corporations are will liked or not disliked by the public, like Apple, Amazon and Walmart.
Precisely. Tarheel asks up above will customers rush to the defense of Jeff Bezos’s bank account? Of course not; they’ll rush to the defense of easy, convenient access to a wider range of goods than they could ever get from local sources, at competitive prices, delivered fast and reliably, with consumer ratings to aid in selection. Yapping about Bezos does zilch to advance the cause.
Then they will continue to lose employment opportunities locally.
Yapping itself does little to advance the cause. Get anti-monopoly policies in place will not happen through a marketing campaign on the media. It will happen when there is a change of consciousness that ripples out through personal networks and affects who people vote for.
People are more than consumers.
I’ve mentioned this before but it’s still relevant: while my day job is in DC my family has a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of VA, a beautiful area with a lot of cattle, corn and very modest incomes – and lots of Confederate flags. Many of the locals are culturally conservative but a surprising number of Northerners have started up wineries, breweries, other small businesses so much so that there is a shortage of trades people (defined as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc.). Local people like the fact that some people (a large number of them outside the Valley) are… Read more »
Back on May 9, I put in a comment on one of Mr. Longman’s early posts leading to his “Monthly” article asking about how specifically he would recommend dealing with Amazon. I uurged that his thinking on this matter be spelled out in a longer form. In the article, he refers to “platform monopolies” such as Amazon but does not suggest any specific approach. Since my May 9 comment received no response but was fairly well rated, I’m repeating it here in case Mr. Longman wants to address the issue, which is really important in this context. BEGIN TEXT This… Read more »
Here is how I would deal with Amazon. I would break away all of its conglomerative businesses, leaving its original book market to compete with Barnes and Noble, ABE, and other internet booksellers. That means that its ISP server division would be independent and competing with other ISPs. And it’s online shops division would be independent and competing with Etsy and similar online shop providers. Amazon does enable “these folks so that they could continue to immure themselves and their progeny in 1950s-era mental fortress” by providing a marketing platform for all sorts of nonsense as well as all sorts… Read more »
I’m still interested in hearing from Martin Longman on this issue, since he raised the question of “platform monopolies” in his article and mentioned it about a month ago when I made my original comment. I’m wondering a bit about the feasibility of the solution you propose. Both Amazon’s wide product availability and its quick delivery relate to the existence of large Amazon warehouses in a lot of places nationwide. (This network serves both the “shops” side and the “books” side, so splitting them would be pretty artificial.) The delivery options also relate to Amazon’s well-established relationship with the USPS,… Read more »
Splitting up AT&T (geographically), Standard Oil (geographically) and American Tobacco (establishing competing brands) was in all cases arbitrary. Re-establishing locally-owned enterprises means fragmenting the supply chain that allows platform monopolies to consolidate. It also means reestablishing some of that supply chain more locally. That cannot be done by anti-trust action alone. It requires other governmental policies to rearrange the incentives. A political war with Amazon and its customer base? That requires succumbing to Amazon’s propaganda that there is no alternative to the Amazon business model. I’m not sure that baiting BooMan will get an answer. What unregulated capitalism does is… Read more »
Do you really want to take on Amazon? It is a well liked company and it serves its market well. I’m not at all sure you can make the case that it harms the public which is the number one criteria. In fact, I find it quite convenient myself and the prices are competitive.
I think there are many who would object to the break up, investors as well as consumers.
I think when or if they do something that harms the public you can have them roll it back on threat of anti trust action.
In an anti-trust case under current law, it is the job of the prosecuting attorney to make the case based on some fairly detailed economic analysis presented to the Federal Trade Commission and/or the courts. That case was made with the very popular AT&T shortly before deregulation allowed reconcentration in the telecommunication industry. Deregulation has arguably created the crapification of services byzantine price schemes to prevent comparison shopping. The same thing has happened in the air travel industry and the banking industry. Deregulation killed the savings and loan industry altogether. I get it that those who are affluent enough to… Read more »
that’s an excellent article BooMan. Lots of good thinking there.
Most importantly I agree with your vision that the Democrats must represent the entire working class not just the nonwhite portion. And that politics means offering people something they want rather than something you think would be good for them.
You have managed to find an issue that doesn’t involve any uncomfortable tradeoffs with existing Democratic constituencies, where laws are already in place, and with solid historical and economic justifications. Who can be pro-monopoly?
The US government needs to spend lots of money rebuilding these communities: lots of infrastructure to start with: rail, road, big cheap broadband. Tax the currently productive and rich parts of the economy and invest it in the less productive/poorer parts so that they can adapt and create some sort of viable economy. Redistribute the wealth, if you like. (Free college would also be good, and I’m betting they’d take it if was carefully sold.)
What’s the settlement pattern? Is the population mostly in villages/towns/cities or is it widely scattered?
Rather than palliative care, I think you have become fixated on your anti-monopoly policy prescription. I have rural relatives in both Iowa and Arkansas and they they depend on access to a wide variety of products that Walmart/Target and especially Amazon provide. Products that no mom and pop store would ever stock. Products that in the past would take several weeks to several months to get through specialty retailers located across the country or across the world. To give a concrete example, one farmer cousin of mine had a tractor break down last year. He was able to go… Read more »
They don’t like the AHCA but aren’t going to stop voting Republican.
Let that sink in when contemplating how hard to try for these voters.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/7/15674380/obamacare-kentucky-trump-ahca
Isn’t that my whole fucking point? That they don’t want government programs. They don’t want subsidies. They don’t want free education That the Democrats don’t understand that they will not win by running on these things. That the way to win is to go after the folks who destroyed all their businesses and looted all their wealth and gutted them down to the studs so that the only hope for their children is that they get a U-Haul?
The whole point is that these people are likely unwinnable because they simply don’t get the “feels” from the Democratic party and never will again unless the party abandons the interests of nonwhites.
Doesn’t matter what economic policies Dems offer. Doesn’t matter how badly Reps screw them.